ChMeetings Vs. ChurchTrac: Which One Provides The Best ChMS Experience For Your Church?
ChMeetings and ChurchTrac are some of the highest-rated ChMS solutions available, and both provide features that can help churches grow during these times when digital solutions are crucial. In this comparison, we will take a detailed look at the two platforms in terms of ease of use, cost, and features, to help you determine whether any of them may be a good fit for your church.
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What is ChMeetings?
ChMeetings is a comprehensive cloud-based church management software (ChMS) that helps churches of all sizes and denominations streamline a wide range of operations. ChMeetings is known for its flexibility, user-friendliness, responsive and dedicated team, as well as its mobile app, which enhances on-the-go access for church leaders, volunteers, and members.
What is ChurchTrac?
ChurchTrac is also a feature-rich ChMS tailored primarily for small to mid-sized churches, allowing them to manage essential administrative tasks with minimal effort. ChurchTrac is known for its all-in-one approach that provides at least the basics in many key areas of church activity.
To save you time, here’s a short breakdown of the pros and cons:
ChMeetings might be for you if:
- You need a fully-featured mobile app for admins and members.
- You are on a tight budget, but need a wide variety of features, all in one system.
- You want an easy-to-use system that lets you start small and scale as you grow.
- You are a community-focused church and need features that let you keep people engaged.
- You want the option of a branded church app, listed separately on mobile app stores.
- You are a large church or a Diocese and want specialized features such as Elections.
ChurchTrac might be for you if:
- Your church is small to mid-sized and values simplicity.
- You prefer a solution that does not change very often.
- You need more advanced worship planning tools, like a song library or room tracking.
- You require the ability to perform background checks.
- You would benefit from some basic file management features within your ChMS.
- You do not require a mobile app but prefer a website instead.
Ease Of Use Comparison
Both ChMeetings and ChurchTrac are very easy to use. Let’s look at this in more detail, below:
ChMeetings
ChMeetings is designed to be user-friendly with an intuitive interface that minimizes the learning curve for new users. Both the web and mobile app offer a streamlined experience for the entire suite of features, making it easy for church staff to manage tasks at the desk or on the go. This solution is easy for members to use too, being built with inclusivity in mind so that pretty much anyone who can use a computer or phone can also use this platform. The areas where some specialized knowledge may be required are the integrations and the Accounting module (which does need some familiarity with finance management).
For anyone requiring assistance when getting started, ChMeetings provides detailed, written help guides, and video overviews, as well as a responsive support line that can assist you via tickets or on the phone, where you can call us without having to schedule the call.
ChurchTrac
ChurchTrac is known for its ease of use, with a straightforward interface that simplifies workflows for church administrators. The dashboard and navigation structure make it accessible to users with little technical experience. The learning curve is rather minimal for this platform as well, though, like with ChMeetings, some features may require specialized knowledge. This includes their Accounting module or the Background Check option.
If you need help getting started, ChurchTrac provides a help center including videos and high-level help guides. Support is available via tickets with a 2-business-day response time or scheduled calls.
Cost Comparison: Which Solution Offers More Value for Money?
Free Plan Overview
Both ChMeetings and ChurchTrac provide a free plan. Here’s what you get with each:
- ChMeetings: Offers a free plan for churches with up to 50 members, providing access to most core features like people management, event creation, mobile app for admins and members, and more. This is a great way to get started if you do not have a budget for a ChMS, but would like to see whether it would benefit your church.
- ChurchTrac: Also offers a free plan, but it is generally designed for smaller churches and provides a more restricted feature set compared to paid plans. Churches can essentially get access to their member management features, as well as to reports.
Pricing Models
The two providers practice rather similar pricing models, based on the number of people churches want to manage, as well as based on the features included with each plan: Both are available through a tiered subscription model in which the prices increase depending on the size of your congregation and the included features.
ChMeetings offers 5 paid plans mostly based on the number of people. Excepting the Very Small Plan (which does not offer Volunteer Scheduling, Appointments, Service Planning, and Accounting) and the Unlimited Plan (which includes everything plus Elections), all other plans include the full set of features that ChMeetings has available.
ChurchTrac offers two main plans, Standard and Plus, which provide access to different sets of features, the Plus plan being the more advanced. The prices for these plans increase based on the number of people you want to manage.
Cost Breakdown
Here is a cost breakdown table which should give you an idea about how much you’d need to pay with each platform for specific features:
| Feature | ChMeetings | ChurchTrac |
|---|---|---|
| Free Plan | Yes, limited features | Yes, limited features |
| Lowest Cost Plan | $12/month or $120/year (Access to people, events, free mobile app, reports & more) | $9/month Or $8.10/month paid annually ($97.2/year) Access to people and reports |
| Highest Cost Plan | $60/month or $600/year for unlimited features. | $105/month Or $94.50/month paid annually ($1,134/year) |
| Unlimited People | $60/month or $600/year (full platform access with no plan limitations) | Available in the Unlimited Plan at $105/month or $94.50/month paid annually ($1,134/year) |
| Giving | Included, with no limitations (online giving is not available in the free plan; donation tracking & in-person giving are). Online giving is processed externally (fees apply). | Included with all paid plans; online giving is processed externally (fees apply). |
| Publishing |
|
ChurchConnect website builder included with all paid plans |
| Event Registration and Check-in |
|
|
| File Storage and Management |
No general storage limit. File attachments size is max 20MB
The only limitation is within the Media Library, accessible to Branded App users: the file size limit is 1GB and each account comes with 10 GB of media storage. Additional media storage space costs extra as follows:
|
10 GB available with all accounts.
$3/month for up to 50GB $6/month for up to 100GB Centralized file manager available. |
| Accounting | Available starting with the Small Plan, for $25/month or $250/year. This plan lets you store 250 people. | Available with the Plus Plan, starting at $24/month or $21.60/month paid annually (259.2/year). This plan lets you store 75 people. |
| Appointments | Available starting with the Small Plan, for $25/month or $250/year | Not available |
| Text Messaging |
|
|
| Text Giving | Not available | Included |
| Online Giving Fees | Processed via PayPal and Stripe; fees start at 2.2% + $0.30 per transaction | Processed via Stripe (fees apply; starting around 2.2% + $0.30 per transaction) |
| Add-Ons | Custom Branded App, with a separate listing in Google Play and Apple App Store. $45/month or $450/year. |
Additional File Storage Space:
|
Feature Comparison: Where Can You Get the Most Features For Church Management?
Features Offered By Both ChMeetings and ChurchTrac
- Membership Management: Track member profiles, relationships, participation, groups, and more.
- Event Management and Attendance Tracking with Child Check-In: Organize events and manage attendance with check-in capabilities, including child check-in with badge printing.
- Paid Events and Event Giving can represent an additional income stream for churches.
- Communication Tools: Send emails, SMS, and voice messages to church members or specific groups.
- Forms: Both platforms let you create forms and share them with your congregation.
- Giving and Pledges: Both systems support in-person and online giving, with features to generate giving statements and reports, as well as to create and manage pledge campaigns.
- Forms Both solutions provide the ability to create and manage forms with a variety of fields and sharing options.
- Follow-Ups: You can create and manage follow-ups, as well as track their progress.
- Giving and Pledge Management: Collect and manage contributions from members, online and in-person. You can also create pledge campaigns using any of the two solutions.
- Task Automation: allows you to send automated communications for different purposes.
- Accounting and Budgets: Both platforms let you manage your accounting and create budgets. Both let you link your bank accounts for better transaction tracking.
- Reporting and Analytics: Generate reports on member engagement, attendance, donations, and more.
- Free Data Migration so you can get started without worrying about importing existing data. Both ChMeetings and ChurchTrac provide this as a complementary service if you sign up for any of their paid plans.
ChMeetings Exclusive Features
- Mobile App: A dedicated, fully-featured mobile app for both Android and iOS, which enhances accessibility for both admins and members. Everyone can have an account and stay updated with their church activity, using the mobile app. Admins can work on the go, while members can keep up with your church, register for events, volunteer, donate, and more. The app comes with extra, mobile-optimized features to enhance your experience.
- Unlimited Mobile Push Notifications: You can send them to all users who are logged into the mobile app. If you have the branded app, you can also send these to guests who have installed the app but have not signed up as a member yet.
- Ministry Management: ChMeetings lets you create ministries under your church account, for which you can manage separate lists of people, events, etc.
- Appointments allow church servants to schedule appointments between them to get better organized. Members can also meet servants and schedule the meeting from within ChMeetings.
- Advanced Email Designer: This lets you create beautiful emails using an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop editor. This is very useful because it provides readers with a richer experience; plus, you don’t have to integrate a third party such as Mailchimp to send newsletters if you don’t want to.
- Volunteer Signup Sheet: While both ChMeetings and ChurchTrac offer volunteer scheduling, the Signup Sheet is only available with ChMeetings. It allows you to send people a link where they can schedule themselves as volunteers for specific event dates and roles. This saves a lot of time because servants don’t have to worry about this themselves so they can just monitor how required slots are being occupied and intervene accordingly if needed.
- Blog: Churches can maintain a blog using a comprehensive post editor, and interact with their readers via likes and comments. The blog can be published online, for members, guests, or both, using the Member Portal Builder.
- Digital Signatures: ChMeetings allows you to collect digital signatures along with form submissions.
- API and Zapier Integration: You can use the ChMeetings API to integrate with your preferred software. Additionally, you can use Zapier to pair ChMeetings with your favorite apps to automate your work.
- Multiple Languages: ChMeetings supports multiple languages (20 in total), making it more accessible to international churches.
- Two-factor Authentication, which you can make mandatory for church servants. This is a highly valuable security feature that increases protection for the data stored in your ChMeetings database.
- Diocese features like a private database, dedicated domain, or custom PowerBI reports are only available with ChMeetings.
- Optional Branded App: ChMeetings offers an optional branded app, which allows churches to maintain a custom presence on mobile app stores. Churches can subscribe to this service for $50/month or $500/year on top of any paid ChMeetings plan.
ChurchTrac Exclusive Features
- Text Giving lets members give to your church using text messages.
- More Advanced Worship Planning, including a song library, lyrics and chords, and SongSelect integration; as well as team scheduling.
- Room Tracking: Within their Worship Planning set of features, ChurchTrac lets you assign a location to a scheduled event or service. This is useful when you want to track which rooms are occupied and which are available at a particular time.
- Background Checks for servants and volunteers. You can order these from ChurchTrac, via their MinistrySafe integration.
Key Differences
- Mobile Accessibility: ChMeetings offers a fully-featured, dedicated mobile app that is available on Google Play and the Apple App Store. ChurchTrac is accessible through a mobile-optimized browser interface. There is; however, a ChurchTrac app for check-in, but it is limited to Apple devices.
- Service/Worship Planning: Both platforms provide the essentials of this feature, letting you create plans for worship events or sessions, but each manages it differently, and ChurchTrac’s set of features is a bit more advanced. With ChurchTrac you also get team scheduling features, a song library, lyrics and chords management, as well as an integration with SongSelect.
- The ChMeetings Member Portal Builder and ChurchConnect from ChurchTrac are marketed a bit differently, but achieve roughly the same purpose: publishing a web page for your church. ChMeetings markets the Member Portal Builder as an in-app page builder that lets churches publish a wide range of content using cards. ChurchTrac, on the other hand, markets the ChurchConnect feature as a website builder. It’s also based on cards, but lets churches add a navigation bar, a header, and a footer; as well as to use their own domain name. ChMeetings’ version doesn’t let you manage these aspects. Both features let you publish content online for anyone to visit and both behave as a website, though.
Feature Comparison Table
Below is an in-depth feature comparison table that lists the most important features and whether the two platforms provide them or not.
| Feature | ChMeetings | ChurchTrac |
|---|---|---|
| All-in-One | Yes | Yes |
| Free Mobile App | Yes | No (mobile-optimized site) |
| Free Migration | Yes | Yes |
| Two-Factor Authentication | Yes | No |
| Unlimited Email |
|
|
| SMS Text Messaging | Yes (additional cost) | Yes (additional cost) |
| Voice Messaging | Yes (additional cost) | Yes (additional cost) |
| Unlimited Mobile Push Notifications | Yes (via mobile app) | No |
| Member Access | Yes | Yes |
| Member Directory | Yes | Yes |
| Webpage Builder | Yes | Yes |
| Blog | Yes | No |
| Calendars | Yes | Yes |
| Events | Yes | Yes |
| Paid Events | Yes | Yes |
| Volunteer Scheduling | Yes | Yes |
| Volunteer Signup Sheet | Yes | No |
| Check-In & Child Check-In with Name Tags Printing | Yes | Yes |
| Service Planning | Yes | Yes |
| Appointments | Yes | No |
| In-Person Giving | Yes | Yes |
| Online Giving | Yes | Yes |
| Text Giving | No (Coming Soon) | Yes (fees apply) |
| Giving Statements | Yes | Yes |
| Giving Reports | Yes | Yes |
| Pledges | Yes | Yes |
| Forms | Yes | Yes |
| Collect Digital Signatures via Forms | Yes | No |
| Follow-Ups | Yes | Yes |
| Accounting | Yes | Yes |
| Elections | Yes | No |
| Automated Tasks | Yes | Yes |
| Reports | Yes | Yes |
| Custom Reports | No | Yes |
| Integrations & API | Yes | Limited Integrations No API |
| User Roles and Permissions | Yes | Yes |
| Ministries | Yes | No |
| Free Support by Real Humans | Yes Ticket, calls (no scheduling needed) | Yes Ticket, scheduled calls |
| Diocese Accounts | Yes | No |
| Optional Branded App | Yes (additional cost) | No |
| Multiple Languages | Yes (20) | Yes - English and Spanish |
Future-Readiness
A key aspect to consider is whether the ChMS platform you choose is ready to support your church for long-term growth. To do that, your solution of choice must also grow and release features that churches need to keep up with the times. Let’s take a look at how future-ready ChMeetings and ChurchTrac are:
ChMeetings published 17 product updates by November 2024
ChMeetings is known for releasing product updates very often, every two weeks on average in 2023. By November 2024, there were 17 product updates, including very important features such as the Email Designer, Media Library, Bank Sync, Two-Factor Authentication, Accounting, Service Planning, Appointments, and more. The ChMeetings Team listens to the feedback received from our community and we release features according to their needs. This makes us responsive, flexible and adapted to current requirements in church operations management.
ChurchTrac published 5 product updates by November 2024
ChurchTrac releases fewer updates compared to ChMeetings. By November 2024, they had released five features: automations for first-time donors, Add My Family - a link where members can add or update their profile or family information, some significant updates to their ChurchConnect website builder, an iOS check-in app, and the option for churches to use a custom domain with their ChurchConnect website.
Conclusion
Both ChMeetings and ChurchTrac are highly valuable platforms that would certainly benefit any church. Today, it is key for churches to stay connected to their congregations and provide them with as much functionality as possible, to make their participation easier. That said, this functionality must also come at a reasonable price, considering that churches, too, struggle in the current economy, So, the best ChMS for your church may be the one that provides the most value for the price you can afford to pay.
This comparison has provided you with an overview of available features from ChMeetings and ChurchTrac. If you are looking for the most functionality for roughly the same price when comparing the two, then ChMeetings may be the best choice for your church. If, on the other hand, you just want something simple to get some of your work done faster, then you may need to look deeper into each of these solutions and see which one you’re most comfortable with. Trying them both for a while is probably your best bet, especially since both platforms provide free trials and free permanent plans. In case you need a specific feature, then definitely research the solution that offers it, in more depth.
Regardless of your choice, we hope this comparison was helpful and we invite you to try out ChMeetings to see for yourself how easy it is to use and how much value it provides, for a generally lower price when compared to ChurchTrac. If you have questions, we’d be happy to help. Visit our Contact page to reach us and get support.
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